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brb: If anything, I would probably say that the proliferation of BBFs is a stage past the kind of treatment that we can see in Batman, whether written by Morrison or not. I think one possible reason for this is the absence of pressure - whereas there are a number of black and minority ethnic actors out there, so there is a material consequence if there is no work for them, and there is also a sizeable black and minority ethnic viewing population to be courted. So, Pete Ross may be a sucky, sucky character in Smallville, but there are actors who want the part and viewers who will recognise that their existence is being acknowledged in the audience.
In comics generally - and this is a broader issue - there isn't the push or the pull pressure in comics. Characters are brought out of the ether, and the readership is, at a guess, largely at this point white and male, still, which also means that the people moving from fan culture to writing and editing for the big two publishers are also the same. As a result of this, and as a result of the historical underrepresentation of minorities in comics (given that almost every character from about 1940 onwards is in with a chance of existing in current continuity), creators have a largely white "palette" with which to paint, and when creating new characters will probaly tend to stick to the familiar, through selection bias, a fear of insensitivity or similar. You can see results of this even where there are BME characters, where often the creator has avoided the difficulties of portraying a minority culture with which their readership might be familiar and instead making their characters wildly exotic and sui generis - Storm and the Black Panther, perhaps the highest-profile black characters in the Marvel Universe, are an Egyptian who lived in Africa as a tribal goddess before joining the X-Men and the hereditary monarch of a fictitious, technologically advanced African nation.
For whatever reason, Batman seems to be unusually resistant to black characters, possibly because it has a well-established existing supporting cast - Robin, Alfred, Jim and Barbara Gordon, Nightwing. This was specifically stated as the reason for the creation of the hero Orpheus and, within the story, his decision to settle on Gotham as a base of operations. However, he was disposed of relatively quickly, murdered by a minor Batman enemy getting a push. From there it's probably down to Hispanic-American Renee Montoya and African-American Crispus Allen, both former Gotham Central police officers. Interestingly, Allen becoming superpowered coincided with his departure from Gotham, but then he had just become the Spectre, who might be said to be unbalancingly powerful.
Much as the rogue's gallery of Batman tends to be exotic and exaggerated, so race tends to be an exoticising feature - thus, in the supporting cast we have Lady Shiva, a martial artist of undefined Asian nationality (post-Crisis, but never mind that), her daughter Batgirl, whose ethnicity is mainly expressed through having huge eyes, and Talia, the beautiful daughter of generically Arabic plotter Ra's al-Ghul, who clearly spent a few years in a European finishing school and is madly in love with Batman.
So, there isn't really a BFF role in Gotham's first family - the animated series "The Batman" introduces one for Bruce Wayne in the character of Ethan Bennet IHAVEWASTEDMYLIFE.
The BBF in comics more generally might be worth pursuing in another thread. I think Decrescent Daytripper started one about treatments of race - linked to above? |
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